The PPP offers forgivable loans to small businesses and nonprofits with fewer than 500 employees, including private schools and charter schools. The loan amount is up to 250 percent of an employer’s average monthly payroll, with a $10 million cap. If the employer maintains that payroll for eight weeks, the loan is forgiven. The loans can also be used for interest on mortgages, rent and utilities.

Small businesses and nonprofits began applying for the PPP loans April 3. This week, some private schools began receiving approval notices from their banks.

In Broward County, Fla., the church affiliated with Abundant Life Christian Academy applied for a PPP loan for both it and the school, said principal Stacy Angier. On Monday, it got word the school would receive $320,000 to help pay its 50 employees and continue serving its 462 students. Angier was hopeful the funds would be in hand next week.

“It’s huge. No. 1, because it helps to carry payroll and keep staff members working right now. But also because we will have to carry payroll beyond the normal time frame for the school year,” Angier said. “I have some students who are going to need extra support this summer to be ready for the fall. We have some that are challenged by this online learning platform, particularly those with special needs.”

Angier said revenues were already down “significantly,” even with 80 percent of Abundant Life students using some type of state school choice scholarship. Growing numbers of parents are being laid off and can no longer afford the gap between tuition and scholarship. But Angier told them they would find a way.

Once the PPP opened up, thousands of small businesses flooded banks with a “tsunami of applications.” In some states, private school groups worked hard ahead of time to notify as many private schools as possible that they, too, were eligible (see here, here and here).

Florida is home to one of the biggest private school sectors in America, with nearly 2,700 private schools serving 380,295 students. More than 2,000 of those schools participate in a variety of education choice scholarship programs that together serve more than 160,000 students in K-12. (Another 130,000 students use state funds to attend private pre-schools.)

The largest of those choice programs, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, serves about 100,000 students. The Gardiner Scholarship, the nation’s largest education scholarship account program, serves another 13,000. Both are administered by nonprofits such as Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.

It’s not clear yet how many private schools in Florida applied for the PPP. More than a dozen contacted by Step Up representatives this week said they had; most were still awaiting word on approval.

“During this time of uncertainty, the PPP program’s most valuable help is to secure income protection for all of our staff so when we get clearance to return to work, we can do so immediately with our entire staff and not lose some in the process,” Jose Suarez, the school’s founder and executive director, said in an email.

Josh Longenecker, founder and headmaster of The Classical Academy of Sarasota, said his school applied for the loan April 8 – and got approval five days later. It’s set to receive $280,000 to help cover expenses for 47 employees serving 365 students. “It’s a huge help because we don’t know what the future will hold,” Longenecker said. Besides current expenses, the money “will also provide us with a backup plan if enrollment doesn’t pick up in the fall.”

Suarez had advice for private schools that had yet to apply: Don’t wait.

“The application process was unbelievably easy to complete,” he said. “However, it does require historical data from 2019 payroll. A school that does not have clear wage, benefit, and payroll tax breakout will have difficulty in completing the application.”

It’s possible private schools may get relief from other funding streams in the CARES Act.

On Tuesday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced $3 billion in block grants from the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund would be quickly distributed to states, with Florida’s cut at $173 million. DeVos stressed flexibility with the funding, suggested it be applied to distance learning needs, and included charter schools and private schools in the mix. Florida education officials have yet to offer details.

With the presidential primary election in delegate-rich Florida just two months away, Democratic candidates are beginning to knock on the door.

In a Monday column in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders found little to like about Florida’s public education system. But our focus is on educational choice and three assertions he made while insisting that “Florida is ground zero of a school privatization movement intent on destroying public education.”

“Each year almost $1 billion in state money goes to private schools instead of public schools.”

“These private schools operate with little to no accountability.”

“In many cases, their students’ math and reading skills have declined.”

These claims are misleading, at best.

Claim No. 1: The $1 billion citation draws attention but does not prove Sanders’ point. He implies that private school voucher and scholarship programs harm public schools financially, which is a longstanding and erroneous argument advanced by the Florida Education Association (FEA) that we have dealt with previously in this space. There is simply no evidence to support it.

Claim No. 2: The qualifier in this assertion – that private schools operate with “little to no” accountability – gives Sanders some wiggle room in part because accountability is hard to objectively measure. But Sanders seems to dismiss entirely the accountability that is inherent with any school that survives only if parents choose it for their children.

That market concept may not appeal to a self-professed socialist but does have real-world consequences and, in the case of the state’s two scholarships for underprivileged students, gives genuine educational power to parents who typically have little.

As to the regulatory oversight, Florida’s largest program, the Tax Credit Scholarship serving 108,570 economically disadvantaged students this year, is ranked among the nation’s most aggressive. The students, schools and scholarship organizations are subject to roughly 17,000 words of statutory and agency regulations.

Among those requirements: scholarship students must take state-approved standardized tests; those test results are reported publicly every year; schools must submit annual financial reports by certified public accountants; and scholarship organizations must be audited each year by the state Auditor General and independent accounting firms.

Sanders is entitled to believe the program is not subject to sufficient regulation, but we rate his claim of “little to no” accountability as misleading.

Students who receive the Tax Credit Scholarship must take a nationally norm-referenced test each year approved by the state, and most take the Stanford Achievement. The test scores are sent to Florida State University’s Learning Systems Institute, which is paid to aggregate and report them publicly.

For the most recent year, 2017-18, scholarship students scored on average at the 47.4 percentile in reading and 45.2 percentile in math. That’s basically average, which is encouraging given that these scholarships students are among the poorest in the state and were among the lowest-performing students in the public schools they left behind.

More to the point, their annual gains have been remarkably consistent. The scores reflect that these low-income students have achieved the same annual gains as students of all income levels nationally.

In other words, they have increased, not declined.

Certainly the average doesn’t reflect every student. In the most recent report, about as many students – 0.6 percent – achieved extraordinary gains of more than 40 percentile points as those who dropped an equivalent amount. But Sanders’ qualifier that “many” students declined seems intended to distort the overall test findings. We rate it mostly false.

A rendering of California’s Piedmont Unified School District’s new, $66 million STEAM building. The affluent district raises thousands more for each student in local property tax than nearby mostly not-rich and not-white Oakland.

Higher education writer and policy analyst Kevin Carey turned in a stirring indictment of school districts as instruments of racial and economic segregation in the quarterly journal Democracy. Carey drinks a different flavor of ideological tea than my preferred flavor, but as jeremiads go, this one is well worth reading. Carey’s delve into the dissents delivered by Justice Thurgood Marshall in the Edgewood and Milliken decisions are especially poignant. Marshall, the attorney in the Brown vs. Board of Education case, dissented furiously as the Supreme Court demurred from further action to equalize funding or consolidate districts for purposes of integration:

Marshall saw the future clearly. “School district lines, however innocently drawn, will surely be perceived as fences to separate the races,” he wrote. “In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities—one white, the other black—but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret.”

Everything Thurgood Marshall feared came true. Detroit Public Schools have been perpetually wracked by crisis and decay. The wealth disparity along the Grosse Pointe border is so stark you can see it through Google’s satellite images—on one side of Alter Road, dense and prosperous neighborhoods, on the other, hundreds of vacant lots. Meanwhile, in San Antonio, the Alamo Heights school district today receives more than $19,000 per student in state and local funds. Most of its students are white. Edgewood, still alone, gets less than $10,000. Ninety-seven percent of its students are Hispanic. The bigots who wrote the restrictive covenants into Alamo Heights property deeds all those decades ago were fighting a war for power and opportunity in the coming century. They won.

This history recalls the tragedy of Reconstruction in the old South and Plessy vs. Ferguson. Plessy’s “separate but equal” quickly turned very separate but entirely unequal. The North’s failure to prevent the South from replacing slavery with Jim Crow and sharecropping was a horrible betrayal of the sacrifices made during the war and of America’s ideals. White southerners lost the war but subverted the peace through exhaustion-inducing asymmetrical tactics. They lived in the South after all; the North, they reasoned (correctly), would not be capable of occupying their states forever. Decades later, in 1896, the Supreme Court faced the dilemma of following the clear intent of the Constitution, or alternatively issuing an order that the North had little stomach to enforce.

The court blinked, creating a repugnant “separate but equal” standard that would stand for decades until Brown vs. Board. Only a single Justice delivered a (blistering) dissent to separate but equal:

But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. … In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case.

Caste however is precisely the problem that Carey describes today. Americans buy their way into school boundaries with effective schools. Suburbanites have deep reservoirs of social, political and financial capital, and they have leveraged themselves heavily to purchase homes on the desirable side of district boundaries. District advocates possessed of a certain level of naivete often argue that “district schools take everyone.” The reality, of course, is quite different: District schools take everyone who can afford to live within their attendance boundary. Those who have paid the toll have a gigantic vested interest in the maintenance of the status-quo in the form of both access to the highest performing schools and with regards to property values.

One of Carey’s proposed solutions to promote school integration is to redistrict school districts in a way similar to those of legislative and Congressional districts. This would be an entirely admirable proposal if one’s purpose were to spur a nationwide political bloodbath every 10 years. For instance, the Maryland suburbs surrounding Washington, D.C., have a reputation as a progressive stronghold, but when a district there proposed redistricting, the community went to Defcon 5. If you want to stare into the abyss, read this article and imagine this happening everywhere every 10 years.

Fortunately, we have a different strategy available to us, and we’ve been pursuing a different strategy – creating school options where access is delightfully independent of the zip code in which the child lives: magnet schools, charter schools, private choice programs and home schooling. Public K-12 funding is safely enshrined in state constitutions, enjoys overwhelming public support, and won’t be going anywhere. Zip code assignment to schools, however, is a practice which does not merit anyone’s support. A frontal assault on purchased privilege may seem tempting but is as doomed to failure as the well-meaning efforts of the American Reconstruction.

If we look at the world as having a fixed sum of desirable schools, we should not be surprised if the wealthy hoard access to them. They already have this access, and they won’t willingly surrender it. They constitute an incredibly powerful bipartisan community of self-interest. If we expand the supply of desirable schools and thus weaken the link between zip code and schooling, and if we give communities of all types more options to specialized schooling, we have a chance.

We should not view an ideal school system as a forever war over finite seats in desirable schools. Rather, we should aim to create a liberal system of education giving educators the freedom to create education opportunities and families the flexibility to select between them based upon the interests and needs of the students – with meaningful levels of assistance for disadvantaged students.

The Urban Institute has released a study of long-term outcomes associated with private choice program participation in Florida, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C., tracking college attendance and college completion rates for choice participants for the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and the Washington, D.C., Opportunity Scholarship Program.

Digging deeper: The results show clear advantages for choice students in Florida. Fifty-seven percent of Florida Tax Credit Scholarship students who started the program between third and seventh grades enrolled in college compared with 51 percent of matched non-Florida Tax Credit Scholarship students. Additionally, Florida Tax Credit Scholarship students had higher college-going rates in all sectors and were more likely to attend college full time. The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program’s impact on both enrollment and degree attainment grew with the number of years of program participation.

A similar pattern emerges in the data for students starting in the program between eighth and 10th grades. Sixty-four percent of Florida Tax Credit Scholarship students attended a college within two years of their expected graduation rate, while the rate for the comparison group was 54 percent.

The study found positive results among scholarship program students in Wisconsin and neutral findings in Washington, D.C.

The big picture: The Urban Institute study results show better long-term student outcomes at a lower per-pupil cost in Florida and Wisconsin and equivalent long-term outcomes at a much lower per-pupil cost in Washington, D.C.

·The average Florida Tax Credit Scholarship amounts to 69 percent of the state’s average total per-pupil spending in the public school system.

·In Wisconsin, the MPCP average scholarship amounted to 67 percent of the average district per-pupil spending.

·In Washington, D.C., the average Opportunity Scholarship amounted to only 46 percent of the average per-pupil spending in District of Columbia Public Schools.

In Florida, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia, the Urban Institute analysis finds, respectively, better, better, and the same long-term outcomes.

The takeaway: Imagine the possibilities if the students in these programs received equal funding and enjoyed the flexibility of spending funds on enrichment activities such as tutoring and summer camps in addition to private school tuition.

Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education on Wednesday released a 93-page report of the Providence, Rhode Island, Public School District that provides a useful cautionary tale on how not to structure a K-12 system, reminding us that big spending and strong unions fail to produce learning for kids.

Among the report’s highlights:

·The great majority of students are not learning on, or even near, grade level.

·With rare exception, teachers are demoralized and feel unsupported.

·Most parents feel shut out of their children’s education.

·Principals find it very difficult to demonstrate leadership.

·Many school buildings are deteriorating across the city, and some are even dangerous to students’ and teachers’ wellbeing.

You can view local television coverage of the “devastating” report here and here.

Meanwhile, the Digest of Education Statistics shows that Rhode Island spent a total of $16,496 per pupil in the 2014-15 school year compared to Florida’s per-pupil expenditure of $9,962.

The John Hopkins researchers visited multiple Providence classrooms and found reading classes where no one was reading and French classes where no one was speaking French. They did, however, observe kindergarten students punching each other in the face, students staring at their phones during class, and students communicating over Facetime during class. One can only shudder to think what might be going on when university researchers aren’t touring the school.

Twenty-five kids in a Providence classroom will generate a bit over $400,000 in revenue. That money gets spent on something, but alas, there isn’t much learning happening.

Now at this point in the conversation, some of our friends with reactionary traditionalist K-12 preferences often trot out the litany of poverty in the district. We can’t expect kids to avoid Face-timing in class overcome the burdens of poverty until X, Y or Z is done. Well, all states have low-income kids, so how does the academic performance of low-income students in Rhode Island compare to those in other states?

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores strongly reinforce the findings of the Johns Hopkins researchers. For those of you squinting at your iPhone, that is Reading on the left, Math on the right. The percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch who scored “basic or better” is shown on both charts.

These results are nothing less than sickening for Rhode Island, given the gigantic taxpayer investment in the system. Mississippi beats Rhode Island on both tests, and Rhode Island’s poor children score much closer to poor children in Alabama than they do to poor children in neighboring Massachusetts.

Florida is the only state with a majority minority student population to crack the Top 10 in either Reading or Math in 2017. It is unfortunate that a vocal minority in Florida seems desperate to kill the policies leading to that improvement, and hell-bent on adopting a policy mix closer to that of Rhode Island.

Decades of cross-sectional research shows a weak relationship between K-12 spending and academic outcomes. During the Jeb Bush era in Florida, for instance, we saw the following outcomes:

For those squinting at your iPhone, that’s a very weak relationship between state spending increases and academic gains. While Florida had the smallest increase in funding, it was among states with the largest academic gains. Wyoming and New York had spending increases six times greater than Florida, but posted much smaller academic gains.

Digging deeper: We’ve seen reporting recently that claims the existence of a much stronger relationship between spending and outcomes. There is this piece, for example, in The Economist. But like a lot of research, it rests upon questionable methodological assumptions. Which are you going to believe: academic assumptions regarding the exogenous nature of court-ordered funding increases, or your own lying eyes (refer again to the chart above)?

·Following the period covered in the chart, Arizona led the nation in academic gains as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) while suffering through some of the nation’s largest Great Recession-induced cuts in K-12 spending.

·The mantra that “money doesn’t matter” also seems over-simplified when examining the international data. It does take money to run a school after all.

Taking things one step further: The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) published this graphic plotting national averages on spending and how students in both developing and economically advanced nations fared on the Program for International Student Assessment, an international test that every three years measures reading, mathematics and science literacy of 15-year-olds:

Breaking it down: Developing nations show a strong positive relationship between higher levels of spending and higher reading scores. Once countries pass a certain threshold of expenditure, however, the relationship becomes much weaker.

·You can combine these two charts with the understanding that all American states would be past the global point of diminishing marginal utility (the United States is the second highest spending country in the OECD chart).

·In other words, throwing money at American school districts and hoping for the best remains a poor strategy for improving K-12 outcomes. In the end, this largely is a moot point; unless states get control of their health care budgets, they likely will lack money to throw.

Conclusion: State policymakers should focus their efforts on increasing the bang for the education buck regardless of spending level. If increasing spending had a large positive impact on student achievement in the American K-12 system, our African American and Hispanic students would not be posting scores closer to the average scores of students in Chile and Mexico; their scores would be more in line with European, Asian and white American students.

‘I remember that until only a week before I was arrested, we were not at war with Eastasia at all. We were in alliance with them. The war was against Eurasia. That had lasted for four years. Before that——’

O’Brien stopped him with a movement of the hand.

-George Orwell, 1984

Oceania’s totalitarian government in Orwell’s 1984 relied on a daily “Two Minutes Hate” to whip people into a frenzy against enemies of the state. As Wikipedia helpfully explains:

Within the book, the purpose of the Two Minutes Hate is said to satisfy the citizens’ subdued feelings of angst and hatred from leading such a wretched, controlled existence. By re-directing these subconscious feelings away from the Oceanian government and toward external enemies (which may not even exist), the Party minimizes subversive thought and behaviour.

If you’ve read the newspaper recently you might think you were living in Oceania, but with the new Family Empowerment Scholarship program serving in the role of the hated enemy of the people instead of Emmanuel Goldstein. I could site any number of examples, but the Tampa Bay Times takes the cake for hyperbolic excess with Death Sentence for Florida Public Schools:

They approved the death sentence for public education in Florida at 1:20 p.m. Tuesday. Then they cheered and hugged each other. The legislation approved by the Florida House and sent to the governor will steal $130 million in tax money that could be spent improving public schools next year and spend it on tuition vouchers at private schools. Never mind the Florida Constitution. Never mind the 2.8 million students left in under-funded, overwhelmed public schools.

The Orlando Sentinel, however, reported the following on the 2020 Florida budget:

In the spending outline, K-12 schools funding landed at $21.8 billion, a $782.9 million increase on the current year, or nearly 4 percent.

Thus, Florida lawmakers signed a “death sentence” for Florida public schools by increasing their funding by almost $800 million. First world problem, anyone? According to my Excel spreadsheet, if the Florida Legislature had diverted the entire appropriation to the public school budget, it would have increased spending by 1 percent.

To the Times’ credit, they did provide former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush an opportunity to respond. Bush helpfully noted that Florida does not have a fixed student body but, rather, is rapidly growing:

The Times assumes that because a child chooses to attend a private school of their choice that public schools will somehow be harmed financially. But according to Florida’s Office of Economic Demographic and Research, over the next four years public school enrollment in Florida is projected to grow by an additional 94,000 students — one of the fastest growth rates in the nation.

The Family Empowerment Scholarship program is capped at around 46,000 students during that same time frame. So where exactly is the harm?

Where indeed? The Florida Department of Education provides a spreadsheet that shows Florida school districts spent almost $863 million in 2017 and created spaces for 30,323 students in the process. Call me crazy (it’s been too long since anyone has been good enough to do so) but it appears to me that the new scholarship program will relieve the pressure on Florida districts, whose enrollment will continue to increase. Funds you don’t have to spend on debt service can be used for other purposes – such as paying teachers.

In addition to electronic surveillance, thought police and 2-minute hates, constantly being at war constituted another trick up Oceania’s totalitarian sleeve. Twenty years have passed since the first Florida private choice program passed; Florida’s academic outcomes have improved all the while.

Ignorance of these facts is not strength, and freedom is not slavery. Florida editorial boards are at war with the right of Florida families to exercise autonomy in education. Will Florida editorial boards always be at war with Florida families?

Rep. Vance Aloupis, R-Miami, narrowly beat his Democratic opponent in 2018 to represent Florida’s 115th District, a seat held by former Education Committee Chair Michael Bileca. One of many freshman members serving this year on House education committees, Aloupis wants to become a legislative leader in early childhood development.